Silly Competition Winner – and The Wisdom of Crowds

Thursday’s competition for Windows 10 rock was won by Robert Matthews (@AskMrM on Twitter) from Wyong in New South Wales. So he’s now got a stack of sweets and a Targus laptop bag on the way:

What’s really interesting to me, is that The Wisdom of Crowds - which in simple terms says that if you ask a crowd to estimate a quantity, the group’s aggregated answer will often be as good, or better than, the answer given by any of the individuals within the group - applies here, even though there were less than a dozen answers.

How many sweets in 10 jars of Windows 10 sweets?

Robert won, with the nearest guess of 420

The lowest guess was 175, and the highest guess was 1,010.

But the average of all the guesses was 439. The actual answer was 450. So although Robert was 7% out, the Crowd was only 2.5% out!

Which means that in reality, everyone’s a winner! (A line I’ve wanted to use for years…)